The Craigslist Murders (13 page)

The early morning grogginess was troubling. It often signaled the beginning of a bone-deep fatigue. Usually the vividness, that almost painful alertness to sensation, that transformed Charlotte after a killing lasted for weeks. It was exhilarating—the intensity of that awareness. The sun
shone brighter. Noises were louder. It even inspired her in her work, gave her a certain clarity of vision. But today, she just felt weary, fed up.

The doctor’s appointment at 11:15 loomed over her like some noxious cloud. Cracking her knuckles, she rubbed her eyes. She’d been roaming around Craigslist for hours. She never e-mailed potential “victims” from home. But occasionally, her wanderlust, her need to lose herself online, was so intense, her palms sweated. How would Dr. Greene analyze her obsession with auto parts? Her fascination for postings like: “Got Rhino Grill/Brush. It don’t Fit the Ram” or “18 Rims Wit Tires off Escalade” and “For Sale is Hurst Short Shifter?” Sometimes, she liked them so much, she wrote them down. Her other favorite were the Strictly Platonic postings in Personals.

“This Guy’s Into Footsmelling” (“I enjoy stockings and socks”)

“Female Sasquatch with Bedsores” (“I just want washing and conversation”)

“Help! My Hair looks like crap!”

“Dentist Needed Desperately” (I noticed the hole in December. PLEASE—I can’t take it anymore.)”

“Tattoo Artist wants to drill you.”

“Wrestling Challenge” (“No real violence. Just wanna see who comes out on top. No sex involved.”)
No sex, my ass!
Charlotte thought, shutting down her computer and heading off towards the bathroom.

As the needles of hot water worked into the muscles of her back, Charlotte sloughed off the dead skin with a new body wash. It was made of meadow foam oil. Sniffing the
bottle, she wondered how exactly one went about collecting meadow foam oil. The product had been a complimentary gift from Rapture,
the
new spa in Soho.

“You’re going to love it, Charlotte,” one of her clients had promised, after regifting her with a certificate for a morning of free treatments. “It’s like a spiritual rebirth.”

Greeted on her arrival with a hushed hello from her massage therapist, Charlotte had changed into a pair of fuzzy slippers and a soft linen robe and shuffled along behind her toward the spa’s inner sanctum. After four hours in a sepulchral room, breathing in the fragrance of pine-scented incense and trying to block out the sounds of wind chimes, chirping birds, and rolling waves, she still couldn’t fathom how this kind of self-indulgence translated into a spiritual “rebirth.” What did getting one’s skin rubbed, scrubbed, pummeled, exfoliated, detoxed, steamed, wrapped and buffed have to with God?

Toweling off her body, Charlotte applied a thin layer of moisturizer and brushed her wet hair. Pavel had called from Moscow and asked her to pick up a bottle of champagne. She was planning to open the Dom.

“I’m bringing over something very special,” he’d said. “Because I think it is an honor to be invited into your home.”

“An honor indeed,” Charlotte said out loud as she sauntered off naked toward her closet.

She was ten minutes late for her doctor’s appointment. The room was packed.

“I’m very sorry, Ms. Wolfe,” the nurse said when Charlotte checked in at reception. “But the doctor’s had an emergency.”

“How long is the wait?” Charlotte knew it was a dumb question.

The woman shrugged. “Why don’t you sit down, dear, and I’ll keep you posted,” she said, returning to the ringing phones.

Perched on the edge of a red upholstered chair, Charlotte drummed her fingers on the chrome armrests. As her eyes flickered over the row of vacant faces seated around the room, she realized that there was a bond she shared with these strangers. Like her, they had spent too many years waiting. Waiting for love, for dinner, for subways, for sleep. Waiting for bank loans and dentists, for sex, for success, even for dry cleaning.

Fidgeting restlessly in her chair, Charlotte sighed.
Whoever had said that good things come to those who wait certainly didn’t live in New York
, she thought.
Age and death were the only two things that came to those who waited around in this town
. She had been obsessed with death ever since those nights as a child when she’d tried to sing herself to sleep. That was why she’d chosen to block out the pain. To postpone the doctors. She didn’t want her fears confirmed. So why had she lied to Anna? Why wasn’t she here, making her laugh, quieting her fears? Casting her eyes down when she
caught sight of the skeletal features of what had once been a staggeringly beautiful woman, Charlotte struggled against the urge to leave, to jump up and run for the door.

“Most of life is about loss and leaving,” Anna had said that night at the Temple Bar. It was the only time she had ever talked about her past; about the loss of her only child and her husband and about sharing her family’s country home in Padua with the Nazis during the Second World War.

“I was only eight years old,” she’d confided, spearing an olive with her toothpick. “And I sat in the back of a courtroom with my mother while a judge sentenced my father to five years in jail.”

“For what? Why?” Charlotte had whispered.

“For collaborating with the enemy,” Anna had fumed. “What collaborating? The Germans showed up and took over the house. My father was responsible for his own family and for every farmer on the estate.”

Tucking her green silk shirt tightly into her skirt, Anna’s words had become rushed. As if by hurrying them, she might distance herself from their meaning, their impact. “When my brother came back from the war, he lost a fortune at the casino in Venice,” she had said. “My father, the oldest brother, had to sign for him. For the honor of the family, you know? It was almost medieval then, the north, the Veneto. When my father died three years later in jail, I began to dream of going to America. And here I am,” she had added before ordering her third and last martini.

“Lucky for me,” Charlotte had replied, giving her a hug.

Anna’s jaw dropped.

“I’m drunk,” Charlotte had said with a smile. “It won’t happen again, I promise.”

As the doctor scurried across the room towards his office, Charlotte wondered why Anna’s losses hadn’t diminished her spirit or her wisdom. “There is nothing lonelier in life than suffering only one’s own losses,” her friend had murmured to her softly before they parted at the end of that evening. “You should keep that in mind, cara.” Quickly picking up her bag and retrieving her coat from the closet near the receptionist, Charlotte headed for the door.

“Miss Wolfe, Miss Wolfe,” the woman shouted after her. Charlotte had already disappeared.

Stooping down to pick up her newspapers in the elevator, she opened Friday morning’s
Post
. The story was the lead on page two.

Charlotte chortled. Some way to be remembered: a socialite and an amateur equestrienne. Then she reread the headline and first paragraph, noting the discrepancy between the words “robbed” and “removed.”

She had to assume the police had now made the connection between Craigslist and the killer. But why were they withholding the information from the media? To avoid the possibility of copycats? Had they perhaps posted an ad themselves? Were they monitoring the site? Whatever the reason, Charlotte was still confident that she was safe.

It was remarkable, really, how easy it was to get away with murder. The first time: the woman with the Dom. She hadn’t planned it. She’d improvised. The memories of Charlotte’s missions were always fragmented, splintered into shards of sensation. The vision of the woman at the door, for instance. She was shrieking. “The fucking bastard. Thinks he’s cutting me off with $70,000 a month.” Dressed in skintight jeans, a skimpy wifebeater, and four-inch cork
platform shoes, she looked like she was dying of Chronic Wasting Disease.

“So did you bring cash?” she’d asked greedily, while pulling out a gold compact.

Charlotte had nodded, mute with distaste.

Then there was the photograph of the woman’s young daughter in the living room. No older than twelve or thirteen, the kid was dressed in the same $400 sprayed-on jeans and wifebeater as her mother. But her eyes, rimmed in thick black kohl, already had the spirit sucked right out of them. Her feeble attempt to match her mother’s smile seemed almost grotesque. Charlotte recognized herself in that smile. She felt as if she should look away, as if it was indecent, seeing the girl’s pain.

She had imagined the insane rush of adolescent hormones, the pole-vaulting leaps between euphoria, doubt, and despair. How she’d loathed those inconsolably lonely years as a teenager. “Do me a favor, dear. Don’t even look at her!” the woman spat out, dumping a silver tray on the driftwood coffee table and pouring herself a tumbler of champagne. “The two of us were tighter than my jeans,” she said, slapping her own butt. “But she chose to live with her father, if you can believe it. Just up and deserted me. Not even a note. I found out from the lawyers.”

Charlotte’s head had buzzed. She could still almost feel the heat of adrenaline. When the woman belched and rose unsteadily to her feet, Charlotte had reached around behind her, searching, blindly, for the poker next to the fireplace. It was the third fire tool in. She’d counted.

Keep her talking, keep her talking
, a voice inside had
prompted her. “It must be hard, being here alone,” she said to the woman. “I mean, without your daughter or your husband.”

“Him! I’d like to kill him,” the woman whispered. “Like that woman in Hong Kong who served her husband a nice, cyanide-laced, chocolate milkshake.” As Charlotte’s fingers found a grip on the poker, the tumbler of champagne slid out of the woman’s hand.

“Shit!” she’d said, leaning over to pick it up from the carpet. Which is when Charlotte swung the poker up from behind her and clubbed her on the head.

The woman slumped down and gurgled. Blood had spattered across the carpet and the driftwood table. Her skinny martini-legs were doing this weird butterfly kick. And her head was all wobbly. Bending her knees and driving the poker straight down into the crown of the woman’s skull, Charlotte suddenly thought of her nanny pointing out the soft spot on her sister’s head when she first came home from the hospital. And just like that, it was over.

There had only been a tiny splotch of blood on Charlotte’s jeans. After rolling up the poker in her yoga mat, she’d grabbed a bottle of Dom from the vestibule, buttoned up her slicker, and walked down the fire stairs to the garage in the basement. From then on, the poker had become a talisman, the instrument of Charlotte’s transformation. Like the banners beneath which medieval knights would rally their forces before galloping into battle, it was an extension of herself: straight, strong and true to its purpose.

Climbing reluctantly out of her bed, she pulled back the heavy damask curtains, put on a pair of red wooly socks, and walked towards the kitchen.
Pavel was probably somewhere
over Newfoundland by now
, she thought. He’d left a message on her cell, promising to be there at six. She was as nervous as a teenager. What would she wear? Something casual but sexy. Maybe the black silk harem pants and a plain white t-shirt.
Perfect
, she thought. And a pair of old red sequined Converse. She’d devote the rest of the day to pulling together her vision of the dacha. Laying out swipes from magazines, the color palette, her swatches and sketches … This was probably the only step left in the process of decorating that she still looked forward to.
Like dreaming out loud
, she whispered, picking up the tarnished silver framed photo of her Aunt Dottie before heading off to polish it.

When Charlotte saw Pavel stabbing at the fire with the poker, she almost dropped the toast points.

“Russians are good with fire, Charlotte,” he said with a grin. “And this one needs help.”

She smiled. “I’m pretty good with a poker, too, Pavel. You’d be surprised.”

“Perhaps,” he said, coaxing a shower of sparks from a log. “But I enjoy this. I do not have time anymore for such ordinary jobs.”

Setting down the platter of toast on her Indian coffee table, she giggled.

“What is it?” Pavel asked, putting the poker back in its place. “What is funny?”

“There’s enough Beluga here for the whole block. And I
can’t believe you brought $4,000 worth of caviar over in a Tupperware bowl. There’s something absurd about it.”

“No more absurd than a once-poor Jew like me eating it,” he said, almost wistfully. “My mother loves Tupperware.”

“I’m sorry, Pavel. Really. Why don’t you open the Dom?”

As he prowled around the near the windows, his hands clenched into fists, the room seemed to bristle with repressed energy.
Like a giant in a dollhouse
, Charlotte thought to herself as she eyed him, warily, from the couch.

“I am sorry, Charlotte. You see, I have just opened my new hotel.”

“But that’s great news, Pavel,” Charlotte said. “Congratulations! We should toast your new success!”